James Acaster has talked about the possibility of a TV version of the acclaimed foodie podcast Off Menu that he co-presents with Ed Gamble.
Acaster was talking to Stuart Goldsmith on his Comedian's Comedian podcast when the subject of a screen transition came up: "We've been approached about it and you know, the short version is that it's just never right," said Acaster. "Usually they want to change the format a bit which is fine, otherwise you'd be doing the same thing on TV as the podcast and that makes it redundant and then you're spreading it too thin and you're gonna lose podcast listeners.
“We've got a format that we want to do, but it's not exciting enough on the page to be able to do that. A lot of production companies come to us and say 'we want to do an Off Menu show, here's our idea', and it's like something that on the page seems like exciting. But we know it wouldn't work. We know that it wouldn't be good. I wouldn't want to watch that TV show. Whereas the kind of food shows I love watching you know, I grew up watching Man vs Food and whatever, I don't want to be like those dudes. But like, I love the simplicity of just we're going to a local restaurant and we're getting to know the people there and what their best dishes are. That's all our podcast is. We’ve just never found someone who wants to make the thing we want to make."
"We've talked about making it ourselves. You know, we've got friends, obviously Turtle Canyon (who filmed/produced Acaster’s last solo show) who can make the kind of show that we would want to make, but it would just be about finding the time. Increasingly now doing stuff off your own back just feels like the way to go a lot more. You just go 'we can do this by ourselves'. And it feels silly that we're pitching it to all these people to get it onto TV when TV, whatever it is now and you know, more and more it just seems like people don't care what platform it's on. If it's good, if you made a good thing, they will go there and watch it. We actually tried to figure out a way of doing it on my solo tour where we'd go around filming but we couldn't make it work. I would have been absolutely wiped out."
Listen to The Comedian's Comedian with James Acaster here.
Listen to Off Menu where you get your usual podcasts.
